To Susie.

You seem to have me confused with fundamentalist racists. Think of me as a "moderate" racist.

I do not think that my race is superior to all others, just that races are different. Some run better, some swim better, some have better solar protection for their skin, some are more intelligent, and some more prone to criminal behaviour than others. I think that the Asians are as a general rule, more intelligent than whites, and their cultures are often superior to western culture in many ways. I must be an Asian supremacist.

I am an atheist who is grateful for the Protestant Christian culture upon which the laws and culture of western democracies are largely built.

I live in a generally peaceful and prosperous society and I want to keep it that way. However much I would agree with you that there are good people in every race, creed and culture, the fact remains that the indiscriminate importation of people into western countries who hail from third world cesspits has been a social and economic catastrophe for the west. It will eventually lead to serious social strife, bankruptcy, terrorism, civil war, and national disintegration. This is already manifest.

I think that the idea that all cultures and religions are equal is just too ridiculous for words. I know that the culture of white protestant Europeans largely defines the modern world, and I am intensely proud of that fact. Those cultures which largely adopted our ways are doing very well. Those that rejected them went backwards. Those dysfunctional countries are the priest, mullah, commissar, President for Life, and witch doctor ridden societies who reject national cultural unity, gender equality, rule of law, scientific inquiry, objective reasoning, democracy, free markets, secular government, and free speech.

On the topic of climate change, I agree that the climate always changes. I agree that human factors can contribute to climate change, and I have no problem with governments encouraging alternative sources of energy production. But I don't buy the idea that the sky will fall unless we all become Amish

I am sorry LEGO, I didn't realize you were an atheist. You mustn't be too bad then :).

I don't agree that any race is more intelligent than another, but rather that some countries have more opportunities for realizing their people's intellectual abilities than others. Poverty or third world conditions does not necessarily mean the people are less intelligent at all.

As far as mixing races and cultures around the world, I would suggest that multiculturalism IS the new way of life for people these days. So many are on the move, and we have so much more methods of transport and ways to move/migrate to other countries than back in the good old days.

No longer can any country expect to live in isolation to the rest of the world, and we need to deal with that fact and just get on with it. Australia hasn't been an isolated country since before Europeans invaded it, so you shouldn't be surprised.
Embrace it rather than be afraid.

Thanks David,

I think we are probably now on the same page. It's characteristic that writers like Marx and Engels and Lenin always seem to be behind the play: they write about conditions which have already been transformed, but stick to their convenient narrative - and impose it, unchanged and perhaps unchangeable - on their Utopian blueprints. And like you and Popper, I would see such 'unchangeable' blueprints, no matter how well-intended, as the mark of totalitarianism.

And one aspect of any Utopian dream is that, unfortunately, there are always groups, classes, races, that don't quite fit into the blueprint, and so regrettably have to be 'extracted' or removed. If necessary, by the millions.

Popper advocates incremental improvement, which our impatient young friends would have no time for. I was just reading Popper's 1973 article 'For s Better World' and was reminded that, in policy studies as in Utopian day-dreaming, supposedly brilliant experts deliberate and come up with a formulation for the best policy. Then they go home.

But Wildavsky and Elmore showed that - just as in Utopian blueprints - that's just when the problems start, at the implementation stage, so there has to be a constant, to-and-fro adjustment, re-thinking, re-implementation process - what Popper would advocate as learning from trial and error - and Utopian thinking simply can't admit failure at that initial point. But there is no telling where policy may lead and what unforeseen hassles might arise - in other words, where the brilliant experts would completely cock it up on their own.

Utopian blueprints inevitably turn fascist: their authors are not possessed with all knowledge, time passes and circumstances change under their feet, and in effect, they are trying to implement something that is both defective and out-moded even when they begin.

[TBC]

[continued]

Not to mention that 'a dictatorship of the proletariat' does seem to have totalitarianism built into it from the outset. I could never understand Mao's 'On the People's Democratic Dictatorship': if it was democratic, with the people in power, then why a dictatorship ? But to my shame, I relegated it to my back-brain, never allowing it to interfere with my front-brain, justifying it in terms of class enemies everywhere.

Charles Lindblom wrote some wonderful stuff in the 70s and 80s on Soviet economics and its complete unworkability. His advice on policy was to devise systems that 'muddled through', that had in-built re-thinking, re-formulation, re-implementation mechanisms, adapting as you learnt - again, as with Popper, by trial and error. What worked, what didn't ?

There is no room for that sort of humble thinking in grand Utopian blueprints.

And, to get back to topic, Islam is the most rigid, the 'grandest', but the most out-of-date of Utopian blueprints, and taken to its logical limits, perhaps the most fascist doctrine ever devised.

Thanks again, David.

Joe

To Susieonline.

Asian counties like China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and even Japan, were very poor societies only 50 years ago Despite being resource poor, they are now economically and socially successful countries, and they mainly did it all by themselves. South Korea in particular suffered from every problem imaginable. Colonialism, extreme poverty, civil war and national division. They are now the fourth biggest economy in the world.

Most Muslim Arab countries are floating on oil, and they should be rich and successful. What makes them failures is their religious culture which keeps them dumb and poor. All cultures are not equal.

Every single black run country on Earth is a dysfunctional failure. Many black countries have resources (gold, diamonds, minerals, oil) that the Asians can only dream about. Black countries have been deluged with foreign aid for decades, but their situation just becomes worse and worse. Even within successful western societies, black people and Muslims form welfare dependent and crime prone minorities, while even Asians from poor countries like Vietnam become upwardly mobile. Your claim that people have equal intelligence just does not stack up. Even within schools in western Sydney, which supposedly have equal resources, the Asian kids generally do better than the whites, the Muslim boys are a pain in the butt, and the black kids drop out.

Two thirds of the NT education budget goes towards aboriginal kids, who make up one third of the pupils. And the only outcome is that there is a 90% failure rate in NAPLAN testing. The socialists wish to remedy that embarrassing difference by banning NAPLAN testing.

I would love to believe that everybody is equal, but it just isn't so. Education and nutrition can improve intelligence, but no amount of nutrition or education can turn a basically dumb person into an Einstein.

Human beings evolved separately in different parts of the world, and that is why they have different physical characteristics and different physical abilities. To say that different environments can evolve in humans equal mental characteristics does not make sense.

LEGO, correct me if I am wrong, but I believe Saudi Arabia is one of the richest places on earth? Aren't they predominantly Muslim?

There are 'dumb' people in all groups of people on the earth, so your theory that any one race or culture is less intelligent doesn't always fit does it, or wouldn't all members of one race, colour or culture be the same?

Barrack Obama is the most influential man on this Earth, and that must really upset you, as he doesn't seem to fit your racial stereotype does he?